Trippy Stellar Polynomes

Be sure not to miss this very psychedelicious 3D shooter, Polynomial.
Assembling clouds of particles and waves through fractal computations, you find silently flying through masses of lights, time slipping, lancing joyous globes of vibrant blue at the abyss, sometimes hitting amoeba-looking enemies and spilling torrents of shininess and sounds as they explode in a fountain of acid colours.





All these colours in an assumed abstract SFish setting feels like someone whose eyes were probably falling out of their sockets at 4 o'clock in the morning, decided that merging the best of 2001, 3rd Kind Encounter and the V'Ger nebula into some kind of bizarro passive/active game would be something worth trying out.
Well it is.

Be sure not to miss the editor!

Neither up nor down?

I must really ask if the next gen, you know, the one takes us by the hand for a psychotic trip into the few-ture, full of high tech gadgetery and flashing gimmicks, is really worth it.

The industry has been rushing forward relentlessly, perhaps even headlessly if I may say, and this breathtaking ride has more to do with a bunch of savant monkeys reckless "manning" a ten tons lorry down a motorway in works than with the elegant battle of formula-one sports cars using the highest technology available to squeeze every bit of speed out of their powerful engines and lustrous hulls (this, being the ideal we're supposed to believe in).

I read this today:

Sony’s games division has reportedly suffered almost $5 billion in losses since the company launched the PS3 in November 2006.
According to VG247, figures from Sony’s investor relations website show that total PlayStation division losses since the console’s release stand at $4.7 billion.

In comparison, the site claims that Microsoft’s Xbox division suffered losses of $4.2 billion in the four business years following the original Xbox’s November 2001 launch.

Oh well, only that. Billions. Mind you, this is nothing new, but it still takes its toll on the sane mind, to think of such amounts. Smells like someone's been playing with Daddy's money at the big casino.
Microsoft patiently waited at least four years to start getting something positive out of their new machine. Which certainly means, in all logic, that we're not going to see any new console anytime soon.
But we'll obviously be served with a gazillion Halo games until we ALL succumb to the Master Chief wallpaper craze.

Only Nintendo and their cheap plasticky gimmick sells like hot cakes.
And the PSP is beating it.
The PSP, aka the PS2 in Urz pockets. The PS2 and its fantastic God of Wars series, and portable Monster Hunter hits.

Next gen consoles take around half a decade to start scoring true gains... only to fill the $ billions wide holes first.
Next gen games takes years to develop, drain the life out of worker armadas, cost tens of millions, if not some hundred now... and are completed in less than a day or two.

Yet, when you look at the core of the engines of such games, the difference is truly minimal.
Essentially, a multiplayer made out of ODST would hardly play any differently than Quake World (it would actually suck in comparison :p ).
There is no doubt in my mind that there's a need for a new business model.

Grimdark Show

You know there's something wrong in the industry when greatly awaited games are presented by a bunch of Japanese stuck ups in corporate suits.





What did you do to my favourite industry, fuckers? >:(

Oh and the game is Final Fantasy 2MANY, in case you wonder.

(Pictures found here.)

Day of Lolz

Hey! There may not a lot of stuff to make fun of, but don't be afraid, Hollywood knows how to fill the blanks when needed!

So here we go... prepare yourself for Asteroids, the movie.
I'm not kidding. Well, they are not.
We probably all wish this was nonsense, and it could very well be, but on the same hand, I'm barely going to say I'm surprised. It's just reaching a new low in terms of video game adaptations.
I know that in the past, there's been a lot of conceptual talking on what about games makes a narrative, and if it could be expressed outside of the game... as, you know, could a gamer, by the mere act of smashing buttons, bitching, looting or popping high scores, be constructing a form of narrative?

Well, I don't know, but Hollywood thinks it does. So I'm going to pretend I got my hands on the script.

Story (rough):

We're going in for a summer flick of doom about a near futuristic Earth which, for some very unfortunate reason, would lose an entire outpost --civilian if possible, but military will do-- located at the edge of the system, including thousands of souls, because the local radar dumbass didn't see the asteroid shower coming in their way, and would then decide to roll out a super secret project of space interceptors to go blasting some stone.
Perhaps add a story of pirates just stirring up trouble at the same time, because the plot needs to be a bit more... bumpy.
Be sure that instead of one pilot, this will turn into the story of an entire squadron if not more.
This shall be the flick's climax, with people dying left and right, splashing on the rocks and the crafty ones firing all they have, in terms of lasers, missiles and nukes, to blast the nasty drifting bits before they reach Earth, the biggest rock of all.

Ours.

Now, as we know, there's going to be a considerable brainstorming going on to grace us with the most awesome taglines ever imagined by man, but we can still try to wager what they could be...

• Let's rock! (please, no)
• What does it take to break you?
• The last granite shower
• Most rocks burn up in the atmosphere... most
• Those are not from Mars
• Catch'em if you can!
• If only Chuck Norris could fly...
• Momentum is a bitch
• According to the rubble pile model... this can only end badly

Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn't have let the execs do their Tetris movie after all.

Update: More news about this... thing... and the momentum building up. You're also going to be chocked (...) about this:

Universal has won a four-studio bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game "Asteroids." Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

Something's wrong. This industry is beyond sick. It's beyond cynicism. And I hate to say it, but if this turns out to be a success, then there will probably even more reasons to hate the world. :)
You'd wish you were stuck in a perpetual April's Fool cycle.

North Korea killz ur web

Here we go. In a long band of suspicious accusations following each other, while the butter mound of rights seemingly melts at an alarmingly fast pace, we've been told that key US' structures came under cyberattacks, through the Internet network, and that these attacks originated from North Korea.

The proof? A mere South Korean guess. Howdy!

Not only one would ask why a country such as the USA keeps putting the access and management of sensitive or non-sensitive structures on a public network (things worked just as well back in the 80s), but we have to raise a suspicious eyebrow here, as the alleged attack could not be more timely.

Frankly, it was obvious that the wretched Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would only pass with the rise of Internet "threats".
The reality is that the bill is the threat, and it represents a serious attack on civil rights and business opportunities, especially as it puts to much power into the hands of one appointed dude the capacity to venture into anything that's called private data, and seize and block anything deemed sensitive, related to this data and activities derived from it.
Intrusive, you say?

RIAA's Deadly Bytes

Another sad MP3 related affair... CNN.com/Crime (sigh) reported:

Woman fined to tune of $1.9 million for illegal downloads...

You never thought ~100 Mb could destroy an entire family so swiftly.
Perhaps this is some new form of terrorism? A temptation? Maybe... the Devil is behind it?
For sure, that lawyer is a ****.
Now, a most necessary "warning" notice, courtesy of the braindead RIAA:

For your safety and that of your peers, it is your duty, citizen, to report to your closest Security & Entertainment Station, the identity of any individual attempting to hide signs of suspicious bytes.

Remember, guys:

Shoot the head!